I'm a Knight. More specifically a Paladin.
I mean a real Paladin, literally blessed with the holy and cleansing light of God, and the power and authority to smite the wicked and profane. I even have an official affiliation, which is Acolyte Sentinel, Six points Cathedral, House Whytehearte, fifth abbey. I'm an honest to god sacred magic flinging Paladin.
Yes, I am. Don't look at me like that, I am.
Okay, you got me. Technically I'm only an ex-Paladin. Ex as in psycho ex, and ex as in excommunicated. Truth be told, I'm not supposed to be able to do all this righteous indignation shit anymore, but like I said, I'm not all that smart, and it can be frustratingly hard to get through to me sometimes. As a case in point, this whole ex-Paladin thing never really took all the way, but not because they didn't try. My old Paladin bosses went through a whole rigmarole to make sure I was just plain me, to lock my power away, but I had other ideas.
Too long, didn't read version: I can still do some seriously pious holy magic crap, channeling the divine light of love, life and creation. Don't get the wrong idea, It's not like I'm a wizard or anything, although I did have a chance to work with one or two in my brief tenure as an anointed warrior. When I say brief I mean I never even made it past acolyte before I was fired. Still, even though what I managed to learn wasn't much next to what those real spell slingers could throw around, I could do things they wouldn't have the first damn clue how to. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but unlike most things I've attempted in my life, I can honestly say I got pretty good at it.
Even though I did, what Mr. David here forced me into wasn't pleasant and wouldn't have been for a full fledged Knight, let alone an exiled newbie like me. Imagine holding hold out a dixie cup and asking the nice man if "please sir, could I have some beer?" and then the guy dumps out a dump truck of beer on the cup. Yeah, you get a nice little swig of beer, but you're drenched in nasty foul crap and the rest of the beer just rolls into the sewer where you wouldn't want to drink it anyway.
I was free, but I felt like a six month old dish sponge.
Well, at least I could move again, and this meant I could bless. This was very important because this would be one whole hell of a lot easier on me then that what I just did, which was the spiritual equivalent of a quickie standing up in the kitchen. It was inefficient, sloppy, messy, and you're spent before you know what just went on. Now that I could bless, I could be a charming swain sweeping the lovely lady off to a romantic vacation in the mountains, and then bang the hell out of her at the end.
I held out the first two fingers of my right hand, placed them on the bridge of my nose, and muttered the litany that would substantiate my blessing.
Ok, so give me a second before you look at me weird again---let me explain I just said. Now don't jump down my throat if my explanation sucks, I never claimed to be an expert lecturer or anything. Hell, at work when I step up to the white board and bust out the squeaky dry erase I think I end up making my point even harder to understand.
But here goes anyway.
First of all, magic is real. I mean, really real. There are wizards and witches and ghouls and ghosts and vampires and demons and heaven and hell and just about anything else you can think of. You need to just go with this because whether or not you buy it doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. Moving on.
That said, I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of spells. I think we pretty much all are. Even if someone doesn't believe in actual magic everyone's seen movies or read books or whatever and you pretty much get the idea. A wizard or a witch wants something to happen and they make it happen usually by sheer force of will and give it juice by using anger or any other emotion that's handy. That along with their sensitivity to whatever or wherever their magic comes from makes the spell happen, and they usually seal the deal by declaring their intent, like with a magic word or incantation.
Now, wizards also have different spells for different occasions. A wizard wouldn't, for example, try to make a tree grow by shooting a fireball at it. Usually.
All that make sense? Well good, because a Paladin's magic is just the same, only different.
Now, if you're a Paladin, willpower or emotion doesn't count for shit. It's all about belief and faith. And no, you don't need to have belief or faith in anything in particular. You only have to believe that you can do what you're trying to do and that what you're about to make happen is real.
I know what you're thinking right now, you're probably thinking wow, that's easy! I could do that! Sure, on paper it sounds like a snap. But if it were that easy, there'd be a lot more of us out there.
Like wizards, we have different flavors of magic. There's lots of opinions on this but basically it boils down to two major kinds: Blessings and Prayers. From fifty thousand feet, here’s the difference:
Blessings are for healing.
Prayers are for killing.
If you try to simplify it that much you’ve got a good chance of really pissing a purist off, but that doesn’t change anything if you want my opinion. Basically if you were trying to close up a cut, clear poison, or ditch a headache you’d bless yourself or the person. If you wanted to beef up your fists or weapons or jump higher or run faster or generally just try to end something’s life, you’d pray. One of my old knight mates would say something like ‘B’ for benign and ‘P’ for power. I guess that sort of works.
Moving on. Just like wizards, we also have to speak our intent out loud in order to make anything happen. Why? Don't ask me, I only work here. Basically by doing that you're opening the door and kicking your prayer or blessing out of the house, and it can only do what it needs to do once you get it out of the house. That’s called substantiating.
It doesn't matter what you say to substantiate, either, not really. The same knight mate I just mentioned would use words like 'Goldschlager' or 'Thatherton' for some reason. He was pretty damn good at what he did though, so I never said anything about it. Another chick used a weird mix of Hebrew and German (how’s that for bizarre). As for me, I always went with Latin because it sounded cool and seemed old and authentic enough for me to have no problem believing it was real.